Speed is a crucial issue in CM 4 and later. There are a few tricks you can use to speed up your game:

• Choose no more than 4-5 leagues(Even less if you are using DDT's)
• Choose small or medium database
• Do you have enough memory on your pc? At least 256 Mb of Ram should be required for a fast gaming experience. Your CPU is of less importance
• DDT"s: The most important way to speed your game
  
  What are DDT's ? They are basically files that contain a list of teams the game should load when initializing. And they are the teams that have the most commonly used young talents, the ones you definitely need to make most fun out of your game.
  
  How to use them? Untar the file you download and put one of the three files you will find inside to cm03-04/data/db and go to edit preferences and enable/disable them. Check the screenshot of how your options screen should look
  
  Where to get them? A list can be downloaded from our downloads center. It will contain 3 files:

1. Additional players 1: Containing Players from most important european clubs
2. Additional Players 2: Loading English and Scandinavian clubs
3. South American: This will load players from south american divisions.